Category Archives: Talking

Geekdom isn’t a score or a spectrum or anything. It’s a hugely complex Venn diagram and even that isn’t correct. It’s a huge umbrella for some related and unrelated interests that can exist together or independently from each other.. My mom like’s Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Tetris. I like most nerdy things under the sun to some level or another. Between us, where does one become a “geek”? Does it matter? I can talk to my mother about all those things at it isn’t substantially different from talking about it with another geek.

My geekness is empowering. My interests are spread out in so many different directions, I can have a conversation with everyone. Video games? Check. Fantasy Novels and Sci Fi? Check. Star wars and/or/vs Star Trek? Check. Science? Check. Anime? Check. PnP RPGs? Check. Magic the Gathering? Check…. and atop that, tons of things I know just enough about to keep up in a conversation. If I excluded everyone who didn’t come close to my scale of nerd-dom, I’d have like, one or two friends. But my geekiness is a tool that helps me relate to people, not exclude them. It should be for everyone.

An irony to me also is that there are even more “fake” (by the standards of the people writing these ‘Imma ‘fraid of wimmin’ articles) male nerds than female ones. Chris Hardwick from The Nerdist is a favorite. He kinda likes a few big cultural touchstone things (Star Wars, Star Trek) and recently got into Dr. Who. If he was a woman, he’d be called out by everyone for being fake. But who cares? He’s a smart, interesting guy who appreciates the culture even if he’s in the shallow end and knows enough about other topics (Comedy, Bowling) to be really interesting. People would go after Morgan Webb on X-Play, but you see her listing her favorite games as things like Combat and Phantasy Star, and Sessler giving flavor-of-the-month games like Halo or Call of Duty. I’m not saying we should even hassle Sessler about it either — he’s just in the more “normal” area of the Great Geek Diagram. We should celebrate what we all have in common and not the fact that we’re in the more nerdy side of things than he is.

Some nerds might go “Well us down here who are deep into stuff APPRECIATE OUR MEDIA MORE INTELLIGENTLY AND AWESOMELY”. Yeah, right, you wish. I see plenty of hardcore nerds with awful, shallow opinions about the things they like. I could probably have a better conversation about the Merits of the Starwars original trilogy than I could the typical geek who reads the extended series. Most video game nerds can barely have a decent conversation with me because they just haven’t thought about their opinions enough.

Also lets kill the “THEY’RE DOING IT FOR ATTENTION” nonsense with sexy cosplayers. If you’re so insecure in your nerdiness that you seriously think that, I have bad news for you. You probably became a nerd for attention too. You probably retreated from harsh reality into nerdy things to find a safer space where you would be treated kindly. People like attention. I like attention, you like attention, she likes attention. SO WHAT? So if a cosplay girl (who probably is actually pretty geeky. Just doing cosplay and costuming is a cool facet of geekdom by its self), is doing it almost all for the attention, I’m honored she picked some of my interests to use as a vector. Also it’s not like guys don’t cosplay things they don’t know a lot about either. If you’re doing really good costuming, your body type and look severely limits your options. Their fandom involves finding cool looking stuff and bringing it into reality. Deep appreciation for the source material isn’t required — they’re appreciating art and design and not at a shallow level. They’re appreciating it in a way you probably would have a hard time keeping up with because that’s their specialty.

There is no “geek cred”. You don’t go to Geek Credit Report dot Com to find out if you’re geeky enough to go to Comic Con or wear a costume. There are no walls or boundaries. You’re not a better human being, or a more analytic or intelligent human being for being geekier. You just have a set of interests like everyone else in the world. So does she. Stop hassling her over it.

I’m a real big supporter of anonymity. I don’t like the idea of fear being a reason for someone to not speak the truth. It’s also an unfair standard. An ex-muslim can’t be public about being an atheist under his real name without risking his life, while I, a white privileged male of roman catholic upbringing can profess it safely. Our Muslim friend is worried about his life. I’m worried bout if one of my Grandmas will cry. It is a privilege for me to be able to safely identify my self publicly. As such, I have a lot of sympathy for my friends who are way less comfortable with their identity. I wanna be able to socially network with them! But then Eric Schmidt said Google+ was designed primarily as a “Identity Service”. What the hell! What does any non-celebrity need an Identity Service for? On the other hand, how would Google benefit from an identity service? A lot of ways. I was also initially miffed that I couldn’t use the name “Michael ‘Kayin’ O’Reilly”. It’s my facebook name (No, don’t bother adding me, it’s fo’ private. I’m @kayinnasaki on twitter if you want to interact with me). A lot of people don’t know my name is “Michael O’Reilly” and these people are still my friends. On facebook I try and make things easy on people (don’t help that my dad is also Michael O’Reilly and we’re both fat, bearded, balding men with similar faces). So I said “Fuck it”. I don’t use this service a lot, I’m just going to delete it. I figure if the services policies are offensive to me, and if I’m not using it, I shouldn’t support it. No “fight the power” here. If Google+ becomes the be all and end all of social networking, I’d go back out of necessity, but until then? I have no reason to support the damn thing. When I deleted it, Google asked me why. I doubt it’ll be read, just scanned for keywords…. so I decided to post my letter here so my time wouldn’t be wasted.

You’re naming rules. Pure and simple. No normal human needs an “identity service”. If thats what your service actually is, then it is a service for you, google, and not for the users.

I’m generally free with my information, but I can’t use the same information that I use everywhere, from from facebook to my wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_wanna_be_the_guy )? It all says the same thing —

MICHAEL “KAYIN” O’REILLY

Sometimes it says “Mike”, but whatever. You guys have no say in how I identify my self and the fact I have to try and prove it to you is insulting. I don’t even have much to protect. I want to share MORE of my identity. If I could actively display the “Nickname” Field, maybe we’d have something. While my name is freely available on the internet, most people DO NOT know me by it. These are people I would like to find me, and you’re hurting their efforts.

It goes farther than that — this disgusts me because of other people. None of my friends who have REASONS to hide their identity would be able to use this service. As such, I have an active desire for Google+ to fail. If Google+ becomes to premiere social networking service, they will be left out. As shitty as it is, I’d rather just use facebook with it’s loose identity policies, lest my I be split between two difference services to handle just a small group of friends. How is this a service for me again? I’m not going to give you my personal information unless you give me something meaningful in return.

So what can you do? Get rid of the identity requirement. Even if people have to be second class citizens in an unidentified state, LET THEM DO IT, because I want to be able to interact with them. If I can’t, then your service is inferior to any other service I use right now. Also let me display my name the way I want to the people who want to see it that way and let me do the opposite. I know many people by their handles and not their real name, If I could see everyone’s nickname in their name field, I’d actually have less of a hard time identifying them.

This highly disappoints me, because facebook has it’s own problems, and google+ seemed like a decent twitter alternative, where I could actually SAY a lot more.

The difference between a person who creates and a person who doesn’t create ultimately has always come down to bravery. Bravery has very little to do with skill, as there are plenty of hack artists out there (me) who are still brave enough to expose their thoughts to the world. It’s takes a little foolishness and/or faith to go “my idea can be something that isn’t terrible”. When it comes to creating things like characters, settings, stories or symbolism, the biggest hangup people seem to have (even people who are already makers) is that their ideas sound stupid in their head. Heck they might sound stupid to other people too, due to a lack of articulation. They wish their ideas were better or cooler or well thought out or less cheesy and cliche….

The thing is, while there are some brilliant ideas out there, most ideas, when distilled down, sound really dumb. These things do not succeed due to a brilliant core idea, but because of execution and internal cohesion. I like to think of this as the “Worst Possible Pitch”. I’ll try and put some together as examples.

Guts (Berserk)The main character of this show will be plain looking big dude with a big sword who doesn’t talk much but is really good at killing things and gets angry a lot.

Granted if you go post-eclipse, a dude with a cannon arm and auto crossbow and even bigger sword might sound a bit cooler, but on t’s own it’s pretty awful sounding and shallow. Yet Guts is a deep character and he’s deep because of the little touches and how he is executed. Also in the context of his world, his relatively plain design stands out. In other series where a characters can have stylistic injuries and scars, very mark on cuts is from something we’ve seen and they communicate his struggle. His big sword works because he’s not in a crazy anime universe where such things are normal — it’s because the setting is so ‘realistic’ that it works so well.

Cave StoryA bunch of bunny people in a floating island are subjugated by a doctor with a silly hat who wishes to turn them into world conquering weapons. You, a robot in a baseball cap, need to defeat the doctor and the evil wizard in the core of the island while saving your robot girlfriend.

If that sounds good to you, it’s because you know how it turns out. The idea sounds childish and it IS, but that informs both the aesthetic and how the story is delivered. It is cute and sincere while still having a sense of danger. The idea works because it is executed so well. Cave story gets the ‘disney effect’ where it can tell a serious heartfelt story despite being a kids movie. Unlike half of the movies the poor guys at Dreamworks have to make.

CastlevaniaA guy (with no relation to anyone in Bram Stoker’s novel) with a whip goes into Dracula’s castle to fight monsters and various movie monsters once every 100 years.
It’s kinda absurd how Castlevania as successfully took all sorts of horror stories and condensed them into a cohesive aesthetic. These games have Frankenstein’s Monster in them for goodness sake, along with mummies. If you look at the film reel intros for the NES Castlevanias, you can really think about what they did. We don’t think about that now. Why is a mummy or frankenstein in Castlevania? Well because they’re supposed to be! It’s the most natural thing in the world! These games also turned Dracula into a new character and made his castle it’s self a fascinating piece of lore. The Belmonts and the Vampire Hunter have had enough games to create an air of respect around them.

Now, Street Fighter gets to do a lot of things because it was there first, but theres more then that. It also isn’t rocket science, nor does it have a great plot. Still, Street Fighter creates a setting around ‘fighters’ and takes it quite seriously, even with crazy characters like Blanka and Dhalsim. You get a sense of effort and strength from the characters. They give the impression that their strenght was worked for (as opposed to SNK Where you get some stylish dudes doing stylish moves, which is okay too). By keeping relatively down to earth, weird things like Blanka stand out and become noteworthy and the whole thing carries a bit plausibility than a lot of fighters.

Forgetting actual pitches, just look at anything Blizzard does. It’s about as dead simple and almost cliche as you can get, BUT THEY DO IT WELL. The question you should always ask you self is not “Is my idea bad?”. You should ask your self “Can I make my idea work?”. Ideas are cheap. This is why all the people who go “I wish I could get paid for having so many great ideas!” don’t get paid — because the ideas don’t matter too much. My friend reads a manga called Toriko — this is a line right off of wikipedia…

“In a world where the taste and texture of food is extremely important, there exist individuals known as Gourmet Hunters who specialize in the acquisition of rare ingredients and animals. Toriko is one of these hunters and it is his dream to find the most precious foods in the world and create the ultimate dinner course. As one of the most skilled hunters in the world, he is regularly hired by restaurants and the rich to seek out new ingredients and rare animals. “

I think a lot of us will have the same impression of that description. It either has to be totally fucking stupid and bad, or really awesome. A sincere author doing what he wants to do can make seemingly ridiculous ideas into gold. Or make a seemingly simple idea into a compelling, sophisticated one. It is all about execution. This isn’t to say you can’t have bad ideas or that you will execute your ideas well, but I hope those who are hung up on ‘having a good idea’ can read this and press forward a little more.

A person’s idea does not end at the limits of their ability to articulate it. It does not end with the validity of the examples they use, nor does it end before the points that go unmade. An idea exists independent of that. Now, if we’re set that someone is wrong, because we know they are, then fine, this is what we do — use their flaws against them and never really think about it much. But if we’re having an interesting level of discourse and are trying to grow our understanding of a topic, we need to see deeper than what is presented to us.

A child wants to buy a $1.50 can of soda. His mother says he can’t afford it. He raises a dollar and 3 quarters and says “But I have two dollars!” The mother than says “No you can’t afford it because that’s wrong”. Just about anyone would get past the child’s statement and make their own deductions — that the child has $1.75 and thus has enough for the soda, but in a sense we are all, at some points, guilty of this — using an incorrect example or deduction as a reason to entirely falsify an argument.

Now, there is value to being logically right. It sends the other guy back to the drawing board to hopefully come back with better fleshed out ideas. But we, like our opponent, are capable of making those same logical deductions. This is why people complain about nitpicking — it’s a situations where technically something is wrong ( a weak example ) but people should be able to INFER the intent. Not so simple with complex system interactions, but we cannot be married to our positions so much that we neglect the ideas that are in front of us. The more often we can choke down our pride about being “right”, the more often we have a chance to learn something.

I recently just aired a ton of excerpts from a psychological evaluation I had in highchool over twitter. I want to organize it and put the contents up here, but first I think I’d like to give you some context first.

I was a special education student. I rode on the honest to god Short Bus. I went in during kindergarten and got out at graduation. I rode the entire length of the New York state special education system. That system (known as BOCES) had me mostly separated into separate schools, though I often went to class with “normal” kids during middle school and highschool. The quality of education still shows. While I think I come off as intelligent and learned, you’ve probably all noticed embarrassingly simple grammatical and spelling related errors on this page. Lack of teaching in those areas let me develop some awful habits like not realizing the difference between “you’re” and “your” until I was into college.

So why was In in BOCES? I misbehaved in Kindergarten. I didn’t listen in class and apparently poored cereal on one kid’s head. At this point, medication was the big rage and my parents were told I had ADD. They chose special education over medication, a choice I wholly agree with. So even though I mellowed out, I was still just naturally a weirdo and that, combined with how long I was in the system made it so it was never quite convenient to take me out of it. Even when it was discovered I had an above average intellect, I was too far behind in too many subjects due to the nature of the special education classes.

That alone though, does not explain this document. That came after an altercation that started on the drama-starter of our day, Livejournal. A psychological bully, whom was also in the BOCES program, would harass me and act innocent whenever I lashed out at him. He was a nice, clean cut, respectable boy and, well, I was me. Tall and bulky, goatee. Long hair, chains. Often dressed in baggy pants and military vests covered in band patches. I would eventually adopt a style that was more like some sort of punk-weeaboo with what looked like denim hakamas and oversized, flowing anime shirts, but whatever. I hadn’t quite transitioned from ‘scary’ to ‘dork’ yet. The bully, who’s last name was Clancy (I can’t remember his first name, but I keep thinking ‘Tom’ for obviously wrong reasons), made a post on Livejournal.

“Michael O’Reilly confided to me that he was gay”.

WHAT

HOW DARE HE!

The ULTIMATE SLANDER… and with a brevity of word that could have been on twitter! I see this on a school computer and walk into our little private BOCES room, slam open the door and yell “YOU’RE FUCKING DEAD, CLANCY”! Not the best move to make in a school, but to make it worse, Columbine had happened a year ago and people were still on high alert for the next potential killer. So theres me, a scary looking dork who is merely replying in typical male fashion to a slight against his sexual preference. At the time though, it looked pretty bad and I was to have a psychological evaluation. The evaluation was performed in a single meeting with an immigrant psychologist from India, which created issues of language and social norms. Either way, I have in front of me the document he gave to the school after our meeting. I needed some documentation on this for applying for financial aid and decided to comb through it before mailing it out. So here are the tidbits I tweeted from it, along with a little more detail on some of them.

The Tweets

I’m reading the 11 year old psychological report on me from highschool. This is surreal. I certainly confused the hell out of the shrink. D:

Apparently I was into witchcraft and meditation? Guess I had a ‘religion of the week’ thing going on. Look how that turned out. D:

I had religious skepticism at an early age. God and Santa Claus always occupied the same area of doubt in my mind as a kid. As a teenager I decided most of it was nonsense, but could not disregard spirituality in it’s entirety. As a result, I used religious belief as a form of personal expression, treating my beliefs as a philosophical thing, as indications of how I wanted the word to be. Eventually this faded and I just, despite claiming agnosticism, became a de-facto atheist. I think wiccan stuff (which I didn’t even understand at the time) was my earliest attempts at this, before moving on to something that was purely personal.

“Most of the time he is a loner and has difficulty setting realistic goals. At times he becomes verbally aggressive.” Well, that’s spot on.

These days it’s more ‘textually aggressive’, but hey.

“His teacher gave the history that Michael creates imaginary situations to applied reality.” Needs to be a hashtag for tweeting private docs

Stupid shrink, I was rambling insanely about the ASTRAL PLANE not the ASTRO PLANE. What the fuck is an astro plane? The space shuttle?

The astral planes is what I called the heavens, mostly from setting building and roleplaying after school. I think I nabbed the idea from Shadowrun? Either way the worry was I thought this was all reality. This probably stems from stuff like me talking about meditation and the astralplanes.

“When I am with a girl I look for deep purification and sensory enhancement” … Please be short hand for something less insane I said.

“It appears that his girl is only fantasy or available on the internet” ………… :(

Ouch! Clearly he was having a problem understanding me, between my tendency to ramble and his use of english as a second language. Still, I had this big purity hang up when it comes to women. In a lot of ways I was a ‘well meaning chauvinist” until my first real girlfriend. Women were to be pure and protected and safe. I already had the character of Cassara, but she had not come into her intimidating, masculine form yet. I also had lame belief’s that sex wasn’t supposed to be ‘fun’. That it had to be ‘sacred’ or some bullshit. One of my later girlfriends I remember found this very silly and rightfully so.

As for the internet thing, I did have an internet girlfriend at the time. It was awkward and I barely remember our interactions, but she was a real person. Heck, I’m actually friends with her on facebook now. Back then the idea was still pretty damn odd though so I can’t blame him for treating it as something on par with self delusion.

“He knew his home address, telephone number and the composition of his family” Sweet, did I get a gold star for that? :D

On my parents and my behavior: “They don’t get upset. I wreck my room. My 5 year old sister annoys me” She was actually 6 :(

I didn’t have problems with neologisms, I was making a setting, gosh darnit!

The paper mentioned neologisms a lot. He treated them in the psychological sense — words I use that are meaningless to others. In truth, they were meaningless to him. They were words that had meaning to the internet community I was roleplaying with at the time (lol AOL chat). This was a pretty awkward and new idea at the time. I wasn’t even the only one in class who roleplayed online, though I think I was the least ashamed of it.

I’ve actually discarded many of the terms I used with him, but still, the language of a setting and fantasy I think is very important. As a psychologist, looking at someone who was viewed as having a pre-disposition to being “a crazy”, he took it as something psychological.

“When he was asked his hobby, he mentioned he likes to watch tv, mostly Japanese cartoons and space soap operas” … Such a weeaboo. :D

On things I hated: “The elite and pretty. They call me fake and a loser. They appear judgmental. I feel annoyed with authority.” So angry!

It’s amazing how fast this dropped in college. Only in highschool do such petty things seem to matter. Still, I was clearly a pretty grumpy teenager. A grumpy, weeaboo teenager.

“Student was developed and well nourished for his age. He was clean in habit. He had long hair and was wearing a chain made of paper clips”

I think I had a safety pin earring too. I still wear part of my highschool wallet chain (not paperclips). I like being attached to my money.

Goes with what I said above. I was a pretty wacky guy. I’ve kept chains (Never lost my wallet, never lost my keys), but the “earring” went when I almost got into a fight and I got worried about it getting yanked out. Part of this came from the fact that I knew my girlfriend at the time had done that to another girl. How terrifying.

Oh jeez, apparently when someone pissed me off I would curse under my breath in japanese. I was such a little loser! :D

Some of this is about me being delusional that students were conspiring against me. But it was true. One’s mom apologized years later for it

I’m mostly talking about Clancy here. My mother apparently worked with his mom later in life, where she apologized profusely for the torment that her son put me through, well after I was done with high school. I don’t mind that I never got personally vindicated, but I am disappointed no one ever realized that he was some sort of scum sucker. Hopefully he’s turned out well, as highschool brings the worst out of us and is not always representative of who we become.

“I don’t understand why she doesn’t like me. I am a pacifist. She despises my word.” prbly a typo for work, but “Despises my word” is badass

“He described him self as philosophical, looks like a man, interested in psychology and combined total everything” ……… What?

KILL THE INFIDEL. SHE IS A HERETIC. SHE DESPISES MY WORD!
Sometimes I have no fucking idea what I actually said.

A few more… “Astrolplanes and the practice of witchcraft prevent him from getting depressed”

“His affect were somewhat bluned, his smiles were superficial he talked of difficulty sleeping because of too many thoughts at one time”

“I get depressed, suicidal thoughts come to me, but I meditate, I can control my self, non-visual things my spirit can move my spirit 1/4” ?

Same with these. I have no idea what “move my spirit 1/4” was supposed to be. Move my spirit… forth? I have no idea, but clearly I said some stuff he found to be pretty damn weird. I can’t blame him. I think I liked having an audience to postulate insanity at, not realizing there might be reprocussions. I was expressing my identity at the time at him and his interest made it seem like I should keep going. He was probably one of the few people who seemed to be listening to me ever — and that’s because he was, just not for the reasons I thought. He wanted to see what I would do when I was given enough rope to hang my self.

The answer, of course, was to hang my self.

There was a lot more, but it wasn’t sized well for twitter. There was stuff like my naive sexism. Stuff like the huge tome of a novel I wrote, which probably reads like incoherent fanfiction (though it was at least original). There was more on me being suicidal, a short lived, attention seeking phase. Those thoughts disappeared with my first real relationship and never came back. In fact, most of this nonsense died on the spot in college. Highschool, in my memory, feels like some sort of crazy madhouse at a circus, filled with all sorts of wacky mirrors. It seemed to have a natural effect (combined with our age at the time) to bring forth characterless of our personalities.

Either way, I feel good putting this all out there. I feel pretty well off now and happy. Theres a lot more to this story, but it doesn’t involve these pieces of paper. Maybe I’ll get into that someday, but it’d be gratuitous now. A lot of people on twitter seemed to enjoy this — likely because they could relate, I’d guess. It was probably a weird time for a lot of us nerds.

Update 8/4/2011: I received a psychological evaluation, it turns out not only that nothing is wrong with me, but I’m above average in everything. So I’m like, my brain is awesome and I’m just a bum. Sweet!

I’ve always had a strong disdain for ideology. When I was young, I had ideologies but didn’t realize what they were at the time. To 16 year old me, ideologies were things people who were wrong had. I’m a much more balanced individual now, as one would expect when comparing someone to themselves when they were a teenager. The other day, my good e-friend from Hong Kong, garcia1000 (the lower cased name and number is critical to the true garcia1000 experience) shared with me a great quote from Charlie Munger. If you don’t know (I didn’t until he told me), Munger is one of Warren Buffet’s most trusted partners and a very rich man in his own right. Anyways, the quote goes as followed.

Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one’s mind. You see it a lot with T.V. preachers — many have minds made of cabbage — but it can also happen with political ideology. When you’re young it’s easy to drift into loyalties and when you announce that you’re a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out, what you’re doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, and you’re gradually ruining your mind. So you want to be very, very careful of this ideology. It’s a big danger.

In my mind, I have a little example I use whenever I think about ideology. The example is these Scandinavia canoeists who succeeded in taming all the rapids of Scandinavia and they thought they would tackle the whirlpools of the Aron [sp.] Rapids here in the United States. The death rate was 100%. A big whirlpool is not something you want to go into, and I think the same is true about a really deep ideology.

I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who support it. I think only when I’ve reached that state am I qualified to speak. This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is a very, very important thing in life.

I liked this little passage a lot, as it highlights the danger of ideology. The sad part is that these days, we are filled with ideology. The worst of it is political, because that just doesn’t result in a lack of thinking, it creates huge obstacles when it comes to getting anything done. Both sides approach issues by finding evidence to support their ideologies. Even when politicians don’t do this, they are drowned out by people who do. I find my self these days to be a liberal leaning moderate, but I don’t even care if someone shares my viewpoints anymore. Instead, I care about why people have their views. It is intensely unpleasant for me to see people expose points that I hold dear, but do so not because it makes sense, but because they have been suckling on the party koolaid too long.

My friend Paul and I argue about this frequently. I hesitate to call him a conspiracy theorist, but he does hold a very negative view on humanity that lends him to assume the worst. Paul believes in organized, very deliberate undermining of our system of government. Myself on the other hand believe, due to intense ideology, that these problems are not caused by people scheming or trying to play the system, they’re caused by people honestly believing they have the answer to everything because they keep beating it into their head. Even if they don’t at first, dirty campaign tricks, loaded questions and various other techniques beat their own axioms into their head. One thing I love about Paul though is he is not prone to intense ideology either. He disagrees with me, but for all his hate, sees my view and will discuss things under the context of my view and I do the same for him. We do this because our ideologies are not rock solid. We share information and ideas, discuss each others views and, at the end, come out with more information then we had before. We have constructive conversations despite having very different world views.

This is lacking in public discourse. Talking points are repeated over and over again. No one is converting the other side. We are merely entrenching. This is dangerous and scary to me. With how media is now, you can choose a new outlet that spins any story into a flavor you prefer. Our intake of news these days is done in a way that reaffirms what we already believe. We watch shows with people who tear apart the opposition. We celebrate their victories while our adversaries use it to demonize us. We think this is helping, we think this is making a point and exposing the fallacy of the enemy, but really we are just patting our selves on the backs. Nothing is being accomplished outside of the widening of the rift between people of differing opinions.

I wish people in the media would see the value of real discussion and real idea sharing. Instead we are in this feedback loop that pushes or biases further and further in each direction. I WELCOME those who disagree with me to disagree with me openly, honestly and fairly. I am not so married to my beliefs as to think I could not learn something. In fact, I feel feeble about opinions I have that have not been vetted in civil discourse. Again, I wish more people felt this shame over their thoughts and ideas. Maybe then we would come up with more balanced solutions to problems.